BY C.M. MAYO — June 20, 2022 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
Because of some recent whatnot & etc. this finds me flailingly behind with my email. Slowly but surely I am catching up; however you will never find me complaining about email when among the missives are such beautiful gifts as this, from American poet Hiram Larew:
This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
Just a small election of the translations of La Relación, as well as paraphrases of the Relación, commentaries, histories, and biographies of Cabeza de Vaca.
Yes, that most memorable of conquistadors’ names, Cabeza de Vaca, means Cow Head. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was, among many things, the author of the first printed book on what is now the American Southwest and the great state of Texas— back when it was terra incognita, the 1500s. I have already written about Cabeza de Vaca and his book, La Relación, in a longform essay about the Mexican literary landscape, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla.”
My longform essay about the Mexican literary landscape is now available as a Kindle.
Now that I’m writing about Far West Texas, Cabeza de Vaca pops in again, but where in Far West Texas was he, exactly? Towards answering that question, for my working library, which I have dubbed the Texas Bibliothek, I’ve accumulated a hefty stack of Cabeza de Vaca biographies, histories, and translations of his La Relación. (I do read Spanish, and in fact I’m a translator myself, however I specialize in contemporary Mexican writing, not 16th century Spanish, large chunks of which can float by me like so much Gabbahuaque.) The consternating thing is, in these various tomes the various routes mapped out for Cabeza de Vaca’s travels differ wildly.
As recounted in La Relación, Cabeza de Vaca’s travels encompass, from southern Spain, the Canary Islands, Cuba, Florida, the Galveston area, his enslavement in the general region we call South Texas and what is now northern Mexico, also his trek through Far West Texas, and thence a jog southwest to the Pacific coast, where he was rescued by Spanish slavers, and on to Mexico City-Tenochtitlan, where he was received by Hernán Cortez, conquistador of the Aztec Empire, the Marqués del Valle, himself. (Subsequently, after writing his Relación, Cabeza de Vaca was sent to Argentina, and from there, for being much too nice to the Indians, returned to Spain in chains.)
There is indeed a library’s-worth to say about the life and times of this most unusual conquistador and his fantastic travels and ghastly travails.
THE TWO EDITIONS, 1542 and 1555
A first edition of La Relación appeared in Zamora, Spain in 1542; a second, slightly different, edition in 1555. The latter is available for viewing online at the Witliff Collections— have a look here. To bamboozle matters, some English translations are of the 1542 edition; others of the 1555; some a medley of both.
Of the differences between the two editions, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Bandelier translation (discussed below), Ilan Stavans says:
“Whereas the [edition] of 1542 is an attempt to show his courage and achievements to Charles V, the 1555 edition seeks to present the author in a good light so as to cleanse his reputation from charges against him after his forays in South America. Therein lies the difference: the first is a report, the second is an engaging, persuasive act of restoration.”
In addition there was a testimony known as The Joint Report given by Cabeza de Vaca and the other two Spanish survivors of the Narváez Expediton upon their return. The original of The Joint Report has been lost, however a partial transcription was made by historian Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557), and included in his Historia general y natural de las Indias— a verily massive collection of 19 books not published in its entirety until (not a typo) 1851. There is a good website in English on Oviedo’s Historia general y natural at Vassar which you can view here. The notable biographies of and narrative histories about Cabeza de Vaca also incorporate the Joint Report from Oviedo. (I’ll be doing a post on some of those works next first Monday.)
NOTES ON SELECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATIONSOF CABEZA DE VACA’S LA RELACIÓN
SAMUEL PURCHAS, 1625
The first English translation, by Samuel Purchas, came out in 1625—nearly a century later— sandwiched into a collection of exploration narrativesentitled Purchas His Pilgrimes. You can read about that at the Witliff Collections Cabeza de Vaca website. Purchas’ source was the Italian translation of 1556, which explains his calling the author “Capo di Vaca.” Not in my working library, last I checked. If you ever happen to come upon an original edition of Purchas His Pilgrims on offer, and perchance have the clams to buy it, I would suggest that, forthwith, you donate it to a worthy institutional library.
THOMAS BUCKINGHAM SMITH, 1851and 1871
Astonishingly, no English translation was made directly from the Spanish original of Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación, until Thomas Buckingham Smith‘s in 1851, of the 1555 edition. That it would take over three centuries for a stand-alone English translation of such a major work in the history of the Americas to appear is, in itself, telling— as was the historical moment: the wake of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, which ended the US-Mexican War and considerably expanded the territory of the United States at the expense of its sister Republic.
The New York Historical Society, which has Smith’s papers, offers this brief, albeit most interesting, biographical sketch of the far-traveling translator:
“Thomas Buckingham Smith was a lawyer, diplomat, antiquarian, and author. Smith was born on October 21, 1810 on Cumberland Island, Georgia. The family moved to St. Augustine, Florida in 1820, when Smith’s father was appointed U.S. Consul to Mexico. Smith attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1836. Following graduation, Smith worked in the Maine office of Samuel Fessenden, a politician and abolitionist. He returned to St. Augustine in 1839 and served as a secretary to Robert R. Reid, governor of the Territory of Florida from 1839-1841. Smith served as a member of the Florida Territorial Legislative Council in 1841. He married Julia Gardner of Concord, New Hampshire in 1843.
“Throughout his life, Smith was a devoted student of North American history, specifically Spanish colonialism and Native American cultures and languages. In order to further his studies, Smith lobbied U.S. government officials for diplomatic appointments abroad. He was successful in obtaining positions in the U.S. embassies of Mexico (1850-1852) and Spain (1855-1858).
“While abroad, Smith actively purchased, transcribed and translated manuscripts related to the Spanish colonization of North America. Smith also supplemented his income by selling rare books and manuscripts to collectors in the U.S., including Peter Force, an editor and politician, whose collection was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1867. During the 1850-1860s, Smith translated and edited several publications, including Colección de varios documentos para la historia de la Florida y tierras adyacentes (1857), A grammatical sketch of the Heve language (1861), Narratives of the career of Hernando de Soto in the conquest of Florida (1866), and Relation of Alvar Nunez Cabeca de Vaca (1871).
Smith died in New York City in 1871 and was buried in St. Augustine.
Note that the New York Historical Society biography is mistaken: A first edition of Smith’s translation of La Relación appeared in 1851; the second edition, edited by J.G. Shea, was published posthumously in 1871. I am sorry to say that I have not yet seen a copy of this translation; I will have to remedy that. I note that inexpensive reprints are widely available.
MRS. FANNY BANDELIER, 1905
Mr and Mrs Bandelier, she the esteemed translator of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación. From the NYPL archive (which notes that this image can be freely used).
This second translation of La Relación– from the 1542 edition– was made by Mrs. Fanny Bandelier, and originally published in 1905 as The Journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Mrs. Bandelier’s translation held its ground for many decades. According to Cleve Hallenbeck, in his Journey and Route of Cabeza de Vaca, published in 1940:
“Of the two English translations I, in common with nearly all other students, prefer the Bandelier. The Smith translation was admittedly defective, and Smith was engaged in its revision at the time of his death in 1871. It was the need for a more accurate translation that prompted Mrs. Bandelier to undertake the task.” (p.24)
Cyclone Covey, on the other hand, has this to say about the Smith and the Bandelier, in his introduction to his 1961 translation (notes on that below):
“The translation that follows has been checked against both of these and is deeply indebted to the more literal Smith version.”
Go figure.
The Briscoe Center at University of Texas, Austin has a collection of documents transcribed from those in the Archivo General de las Indias in 1914-1917 by Fanny and her husband, Adolphe Francis Alphonse Bandelier. From that website, we have a biographical note for Mr. Bandelier but, alas, not Mrs:
“Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier (1840 – 1914) was an American archaeologist after whom Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico is named. Bandelier was born in Bern, Switzerland, and emigrated to the United States in his youth. After 1880 he devoted himself to archaeological and ethnological work among the Indians of the southwestern United States, Mexico and South America. Beginning his studies in Sonora (Mexico), Arizona and New Mexico, he made himself the leading authority on the history of this region, and — with F. H. Cushing and his successors — one of the leading authorities on its prehistoric civilization. In 1892 he abandoned this field for Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, where he continued ethnological, archaeological and historical investigations. In the first field he was in a part of his work connected with the Hemenway Archaeological Expedition and in the second worked for Henry Villard of New York, and for the American Museum of Natural History of the same city.”
Says Hallenbech, p. 24:
“[Mrs. Bandelier] was a recognized Spanish scholar, and Adolphe F. Bandelier, who wrote the introduction and annotated the text, certainly subjected the work to the closest scrutinity; some of his notes lead one to believe that he actively participated in the translating. His qualifications for such work are widely recognized.”
Well, ring-a-ling to Gloria Steinem!!
My much marked-up copy of the Bandelier translation is a Penguin Classics paperback edition of 2002 with an introduction by Ilan Stavans, revised and annotated by Harold Augenbraum, shown here:
An inexpensive paperback reprint of the Bandelier translation.
CYCLONE COVEY, 1961
Not until 1961, with Cyclone Covey’s, did another complete translation of La Relación appear, this one under the title Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. His translation, Covey writes in his preface, “is deeply indebted to the more literal Smith translation,” and he consulted both the 1542 and the 1555 editions. In the afterword professor William T. Pilkington calls Covey’s “the most accessible” translation for the present-day reader. It is moreover, “thoughtful and balanced, avoiding an archaic tone as well as twentieth-century colloquialisms.”
My copy of the Covey is a 1997 University of New Mexico Press reprint, shown here:
Cyclone Covey, by the way, is also the author of a book about a Roman Jewish colony in Arizona in the time of Charlemagne—you read that right. I’ve yet to read it— the title is Calalus—but it’s extremely rare, although I delightedly note that his son has just this year, 2021, made a print-on-demand facsimile edition available on amazon. Covey had few adherents to his Romans-in-Arizona hypothesis, but I give him major points for the courage to stand by his catapult, as it were, and publish Calalus. (And strange as some things may strike me, I always try to remember that the past is a strange and ever-changing country… ) In any event Covey had a long and otherwise distinguished career as an historian at Wake Forest. You can read Covey’s obituary here.
MORE TRANSLATIONS, 1993
Nearing the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, more translations appeared, including Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández’s The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación (Arte Público Press, 1993) and Frances M. López-Morillas’ Castaways (University of California Press, 1993, edited by Enrique Pupo-Walker).
ROLENA ADORNO AND PATRICK CHARLES PAUTZ, 1999
At present it would seem that most English-speaking Cabeza de Vaca scholars look to the Adorno and Pautz translation of 1999. Leading scholar of the Spanish Conquest Andrés Reséndez, in his A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books, 2007), has this to say about the Adorno and Pautz, in his notes (p.251):
“I wish to single out the landmark, three-volume set published in 1999 by Rolena Adorno and Patrick C. Pautz, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. This work constitutes yet another edition and translation of Cabeza de Vaca’s Narrative plus—literally—two and a half volumes of “notes.” These volumes have taken our understanding of this survival experience to a new level. The book contains biographical information of the protagonists, a detailed study of Cabeza de Vaca’s genaeology, relevant historical backrgound, and a textual analysis of the different accounts of ghe expedition, among other things. It constitites the single most important source for the present book project. I have also relied on their transcription of Cabeza de Vaca’s Narrative, first published in 1542, and often cite their translations.” (p.251)
The three volume boxed set published by the University of Nebraska Press, which you might be able to consult in a library, or hunt down on Abebooks.com, is an heirloom of a doorstopper, and yep, it calls for serious clams. (Ouch.) I did buy the three-volume set, very belatedly, and I only wish I had started with it because it is indeed the most authoritative translation and history and biography; moreover, Volume I contains the original text of the original 1542 La Relación side-by-side with Adorno and Pautz’s English translation, with notes on the same page.
The three volume set ALVAR NÚÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA, University of Nebraska Press. Shown here is the side-by-side 1542 original and Adorno and Pautz’s translation, with notes. Simply splendid!
In addition, I have been working from, and freely penciling in my underlines in Adorno and Pautz’s much less expensive paperback edition of their translation of La Relación, separately published by the University of Nebraska Press. Here’s a photo of my copy of that:
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Dear writerly reader, if you are looking for a rollickingly good armchair read about Cabeza de Vaca’s North American odyssey, there are two narrative histories I would especially warmly recommend: Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange, and Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey.I will be talking about these and other narrative histories and biographies in next month’s first Monday Texas Books post.
Next Monday, look for my monthly post for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
P.S. I welcome you to sign up for an automatic email alert about the next post, should you feel so moved, over on the sidebar.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me by simply clicking here.
Ignacio Solares, one of Mexico’s most outstanding literary writers, appears in English translation by Yours Truly in the fabulous new issue #72 of Gargoyle. Edited by poet Richard Peabody, Gargoyle is one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s most enduring and prestigious literary magazines. Check it out!
The cover of Gargoyle #72, which includes my translation of a short story by Ignacio Solares, features spoken word poet Salena Godden.
Solares’ short story is entitled “The Orders” (“Las instrucciones”). My thanks to Ignacio Solares for the honor, to Richard Peabody for accepting it and bringing it forth, and to Nita Congress for her eagle-eyed copyediting.
My previous translation of Solares’ work, the short story “Victoriano’s Deliriums,” appeared in The Lampeter Review #11.
This past spring I attended theAssociated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, where I read from Meteor, my book of poetry, as part of the Gival Press 20th anniversary celebration. AWP is not for the FOMO-ly challenged. In the crowd of 15,000+ conference-goers I missed many events and many friends, among them the poet, playwright and translator Zack Rogow. And it didn’t seem at all right to have missed Rogow for, the last time I was at AWP, it was to participate on his panel with Mark Doty and Charles Johnson, “Homesteading on the Digital Frontier: Writers’ Blogs,” one of the crunchiest conference panels ever. (You can read the transcript of my talk about blogs here.)
Should you try to attend AWP next spring 2020 in San Antonio? Of course only you know what’s right for you. But I can say this much: AWP can be overwhelming, an experience akin to a fun house ride and three times through the TSA line at the airport with liquids… while someone drones the William Carlos Williams white chickens poem… AWP can also prove Deader than Deadsville, if what you’re after is, say, an agent for your ready-for-Netflix thriller. The commercial publishing scene it ain’t.
On the bright side, however, Zack Rogow attends AWP. He is one of the most talented and generous poets and translators I know. Watch this brief documentary about his life and work and I think you’ll understand why I say this:
Rogow is also a teacher of creative writing, and for several years now he’s been blogging steadily with his “Advice for Writers.” It’s a terrific resource. I hope he’ll turn it into a book–the moment he does I’ll add it to the list of recommended books for my workshop.
Herewith a degustation of Rogow’s extra-crunchy posts:
I am delighted and honored to announce that my translation of Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum’s short story “La tía” as “The Aunt” appears in the shiny new Fall 2019 issue of Catamaran Literary Reader– check it out here. “The Aunt” is from The Water That Rocks the Silence, Salum’s collection of linked stories set in Lebanon, two other stories of which have previously appeared in Catamaran. Originally published in Spanish as El agua que mece el silencio (Vaso Roto, 2015), it won the International Latino Book Award and the prestigious Panamerican Award Carlos Montemayor.
>>Continue reading this story online here and some of Salum’s other work in Catamaran here.
Based in Santa Cruz, California, Catamaran is a stand-out on the West Coast literary scene, and, indeed, it is one of the finest English language literary magazines alive in the United States today.
Rose Mary Salum is not only a superb writer and poet, but she is one of Mexico’s most visionary editors, editor of Delta de arenas (an anthology of Arab, Jewish writing from Latin America), and founding editor of the literary magazineLiteral: Latin American Voices, Voces latinoamericanas and of Literal Publishing which, among others, publishes the “Deslocados” series of writing in Spanish by Latin Americans who live in the United States.
Here is a screenshot of her bio (and mine) from the current issue:
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Back in 2013 I did a very fun in-depth interview with Rose Mary Salum about her work for my Conversations with Other Writers occasional series podcast. You can listen in anytime here and read the complete transcript of that interview here.
And the Houston Chronicle has a piece on Salum and her International Latino Book Award here.
My favorite rare book historian Michael F. Suarez, SJ gives this excellent talk for TEDxCharlotteville:
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AND FROM THE MADAM MAYO ARCHIVES…
Poco a poco (bit by bit), since January of this year I have been migrating selected and updated posts from Madam Mayo’s original Google Blogger platform to self-hosted WordPress here at www.madam-mayo.com. Madam Mayo goes all the way back to the Cambrianesquely Blogasonic Explosion, I mean, um, 2006… This past week I’ve worked a bit on the translation posts, among them:
TRANSLATING ACROSS THE BORDER Originally posted October 29, 2015 Edited Transcript of a Talk by C.M. Mayo at the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)
Muchísimas gracias, Mark Weiss, and thank you also to my fellow panelists, it is an honor to sit on this dias with you. Thank you all for coming. It is especially apt to be talking about translating Mexican writing here, a jog from the Mexican border, in Tucson—or Tuk-son as the Mexicans pronounce it.
I grew up in Northern California and was educated in various places but mainly the University of Chicago. As far as Mexico went, until I was in my mid-twenties, I had absorbed, to use historian John Tutino’s term, the “enduring presumptions.” Translation: I had zero interest in Mexico.
You know that old saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans?
I was delighted to get the announcement for Sleight Work from W. Nick Hill, a poet and translator I have long admired. Sleight Work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The author invites you to download the free PDF from his website and have a read right now!
Here is one of the poems from W. Nick Hill’s Sleight Work which seems to me the very spirit of the book:
Walter Nickerson Hill was born in Chicago, raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and has spent lots of time in Oaxaca, Mexico. He shared Latin American culture with U.S. college students for a long time. Author of numerous academic reviews and articles, he has also translated the work of noted Latin American novelists and poets including Alvaro Mutis, David Huerta, and Miguel Barnet: Biography of a Runaway Slave. His English versions of poems by Mexican Jorge Fernández Granados’ Principle of Uncertainty, appeared as Constructed on Coincidence (Mid-American Review 2010). He is currently translating Gary Lemons’ Día De Los Muertos into Spanish. Hill has one slim award for a chapbook and will have three collections of poetry after Sleight Work comes out in November 2018. He lives on the Olympic Peninsula with his wife. Visit http://wnickhill.net
Before we delve into the Q & A, another favorite from Sleight Work:
After Hyde’s The Gift by W. Nick Hill
Breathe it in and with your panorama lit up just now to the scope of the cherries’ effervescent blossoming into the ether, their tiny china on a weather-beaten wrought iron pea-colored table with chair, a scent of July in vague Lapins where the leaves would have been were it a Camellia sinensis whose tiny white flowers ain’t tea;
something you have to pass on, give away with an authentic gesture over palm fronds shadowed against the wall in a mauve kind-of-awareness that brings out Matisse in the Mediterranean, probably at siesta like a breath you have to give away to make room for the next
and recognize that’s the way energy flows, like the random steps of the Egyptian Walking onion, its scallion agglomerations all over the garden in clumps the wandering Buddhist monk gave us an age ago that continue on walking around us all this time.
Translate from the breath into an object of delight like the scent of Japan in the white frills on a purple plum in the springtime when it should be and make sure somebody else gets it.
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for Sleight Work?
W. NICK HILL: My “cousin,” Quentin Deming, M. D., Chip, as he was known, and his wife, Vida Ginsberg, were role models. They treated Barbara and me like royalty, wined and dined us when we visited them in Manhattan and we knew from stories it was like that with any and all. Chip was gracious, cosmopolitan, much loved by his patients and colleagues, idiosyncratic, capable of skate boarding in his red suit on his 70th birthday, and always ready to explain how some part of your anatomy worked. His daughters called recently to tell us he had died peacefully at 99. And that a constant companion in the time up to his end was my book And We’d Understand Crows Laughing. Chip would have been the ideal reader of Sleight Work; Vida too, who was widely admired for her knowledge of theater and her sense of humor. Maybe their daughters, Maeve and Lilith, but I can’t say for sure.
C.M. MAYO: And that cover image!?
W. NICK HILL: I write virtually every morning and those pages pile up fast! When I realized that I was working on something inchoate I began to shape the whole into a collection. Well that’s one of my principal ways of working. But in this case, I began then to look around for an image for the cover, all the while I was also investigating what would happen if I set off on my own, that is to “publish” it on my website. The image on the cover was a cell phone picture I’d taken of a busker on the Andador, the pedestrian walkway in Oaxaca, the city center on Day of the Dead, November 2017. When I’d worked out how the pose was accomplished, I was ready for the fact that the trick was after the fact, your money already in his cup. There’s an easy congress between busking and begging that goes back certainly to the picaresque tradition, and probably from time immemorial. And busking in Mexico, as you know is a worthy art. I’ve seen a Statue of Liberty across the street from an Uncle Sam, Roman Centurions, and so on. Taking money for little work is also sleight work, it’s true, though not a comely used phrase. But there’s a kind of trust the busker maintains in day long poses that she will be supported with contributions, that their bowl will not often be robbed, a presumption not so easily believed perhaps today. And then I don’t mind at all that the cover image invites the reader to consider the relation between a gift economy and the industry of book publishing in which the value of words has become more perhaps than at any other time in history the value of commerce.
C.M. MAYO: Can you also talk a little about your previous book, Blue Nocturne, and the hexagram poems?
W. NICK HILL: At some point in 2011 I began to compose what I called hexagrams out of a need for a simple meditative practice of writing. With the I Ching in mind, I tried to write those two three line terse stanzas called hexagrams like those I had thrown using coins in the 60s and 70s to find guidance in the words of that venerable book of ancient wisdom. At least I fancied it told me appreciable things. The hexagram’s inner dynamism could change very quickly depending on the lines that moved, so there was always the possibility of surprises, changes. It was known as the Book of Changes, after all. I have also kept up with reading Tang and Sung dynasty poets, though I claim no expertise. I’m just a serial reader of Li Bo, Wang Wei, and many others. That discipline of composition continued for more than 64 days in a row and though I have all of them, only 18 or 19, depending, appear in BN.
Those little poems themselves began to very lightly sketch a
consciousness that was connected to mine but wasn’t exactly. I sensed that this
individual wanted to take himself, or herself, away for extended quiet, as in a
remote cabin in the mountains around here in the Pacific Northwest. The
speaker’s gender seemed to be male but I don’t think that it’s so clear. In the course of this quiet time alone, the
speaker awaits changes for the better that may arise out of paying close
attention to the surroundings, especially nighttime and dreaming, and to the
writing every morning.
Another set of incidents became entangled with these six line practice pieces. During what has become my almost yearly visit to Oaxaca, specifically in 2000, a chance encounter with Una constelación de noches / A Constellation of Nights, a glossy illustrated book of an art exhibit that the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco put together in which he paired paintings and poems. That handsome coffee table book came into my hands in the quiet inner patio under a bougainvillea “roof” at the IAGO, the painter Francisco Toledo’s Institute for Graphic Arts. I have not since seen the book again, though I tried for several years to lay my hands on it. The theme of nocturnes, more easily found in music and painting of course, were still a small literary presence in my memory, particularly Alvaro Mutis’ atmospheric nocturnes that evoked his family’s coffee plantation in torrid lands. This all came together in a rush in 2013 as Blue Nocturne. The color blue, aside from the celestial, came from a personal myth. As a child in Sao Paulo, I found a book with a blue cover in a box in an unused room over the garage, the former carriage horse stable in the old house we occupied. I don’t think I read much of it then because my brother and our friends got our dad to make the space into a floor hockey rink. But the notion of that book surely underlies some part of my desire to make them.
C.M. MAYO: As a poet writing in English, which English language poets would you say have been the most influential for you? And as one who also reads Portuguese and Spanish, which poets in those languages would you say have influenced your own work?
W. NICK HILL: Allow me to answer both the above in one. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, my school mates and I spoke a bilingual mix of English and Portuguese. I loved the way those sounds danced around together! I was very much at home in Brazil. Portuguese wasn’t taught in the high school I went to when I returned to the States, so Spanish became my other language. Consequently, when I read it wasn’t English writers alone that interested me. One of the defining moments in my early life with poetry came in a flash of understanding how García Lorca made a verbal image come alive in “Romance sonámbulo,” from the Gypsy Ballads. So it’s somewhat of a twist to focus on English, but I did pay attention to Modernists, especially Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, because I considered it a kind of (very opinionated) handbook of poetry in English, “The Seafarer,” and the ancient Chinese, in translation, of course, a reading habit I continue with Su Tung P’o, Hsieh Ling Yun, P’o Chu-ie, and so on. I also had a lot fun reading e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and for a time I thought a lot of Delmore Schwartz. Over time I went backwards, to Whitman, Dickinson, and sideways to the Beattles, Bob Dylan, and that would now have to include Leonard Cohen.
Much later, I was able to participate in a poetry workshop
for a heady week with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Michael Harper. That
experience invited me to be more serious about my own writing. After that I did short-term workshops with
Marie Howe, Cleopatra Mathis, and then, a chapbook workshop with Jason Shinder
at the New School.
I had a career as an academic, Ph.D. in Latin American literature. I wrote a monograph, Tradición y modernidad en la poesía de Carlos Germán Belli that was published in Madrid. Belli is one of the fine poets Peru has produced. He writes about contemporary angst in Golden Age formalisms. I studied with Oscar Hahn, a powerful Chilean poet whose Mal de amor, Love’s Sickness, among many others, made a big impression. Through Hahn, I met Chilean poets, Pedro Lastra, Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, Lucía Guerra, Javier Campos, and others. Javier later became my colleague at Fairfield University. Lihn became a model for my writing for a long time. He and I had long loopy talks about modernity. I was fuzzy whereas he had a clear understanding, some of which rubbed off on me, of what people were calling the Post-modern. I also developed an interest in the Summa de Maqrol el Gaviero, by the Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis. My first serious attempt to translate from Spanish were poems spoken by the existential philosopher cum sailor, Maqrol, The Lookout.
I don’t know how it is for others who teach about
literature, but for me, after a time, when you’ve dealt with so many
accomplished, brilliant writers and poets, it wasn’t so much that I was
influenced by anyone in particular. It was more that I admired specific
characteristics, or that the history of genres of writing became clearer
because of the way Vallejo, for instance, who did have a serious part to play
in what I wanted to do with poetry, the way he broke down previous measures of
value to challenge language itself served as a path. Similarly with parts of
Neruda, whose Odes touched a thread with simple language anybody could
understand, like that of the ancient Chinese in English though because their
poems were formally complex and were sung.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about writing your own poems in Spanish?
W. NICK HILL: I began writing poetry in my early 20s and those attempts were in English. After college where I studied sciences and social sciences, I went to Spain to teach English for a year and to try my hand at writing fiction. Literature of all kinds, in both English and Spanish, occupied my reading. Bilingualism was imprinted on me growing up in Brazil. Over the years I’ve drifted away from Portuguese. In any case, when I turned to my own poetry it came out mixed English-Spanish. I wrote a chapbook called Mundane Rites / Ritos mundanos that was third place in the 1997Sow’s Ear Poetry Review’s chapbook contest but they only published the winner. Some of the poems came out in the minnesota review, and others, and in the Américas Review under a pseudonym I quickly dropped, Nicolas Colina. Poems in my chapbook came directly from the Central American conflicts of the 80s and 90s, border issues, as well. One of them was an experiment in the subconscious dialogue between Cortés and La Malinche that interwove Spanish and English. I have difficulty separating my poetry from politics broadly speaking. Because bilingualism involving U.S. Latinxs is contested territory, I drifted away from “code switching,” though I continued to publish in Spanish in The Bilingual Review, Ventana Abierta from UC Santa Barbara, and in Chile. It became clear to me in my teaching that the up and coming programs of studies in the 3 principle groups of Spanish Americans in the U. S. –Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans– weren’t being represented culturally, in my university anyway, in their bona fide condition as USians who wrote as they lived, in English, Spanish, and mixed up all together. And that’s not even considering interesting writing by Central Americans, Dominicans, and others, nor much attention paid to American Indigenous languages. I got a fellowship to get caught up on Chicano Studies at Yale, and began to develop university courses that addressed those communities, in literary culture at least. After all, at Fairfield University I had a whole range of speakers in my classes: English only speaking Mexican Americans, fluent bilinguals from the Caribbean, and foreign students whose English was good. This was during a time in the 90s and early 00s that I intensified my trips to Mexico, pointedly to Oaxaca where a former student, Kurt Hackbarth, had gone to teach English. He subsequently became a Mexican citizen and writes in both English and Spanish, plays, fiction, and commentary.
I compose in Spanish, not in the same way as in English
exactly, but directly, that is to say I don’t translate, though that too is
inaccurate. There is a mental space, or a consciousness accompanied by
intuition and emotion where languages intermingle. The closest analogy would be
sexual. And it’s in that embrace of languages where I enjoy hanging out.
C.M. MAYO: What is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a poet who would like to try translating another poet?
W. NICK HILL: After a career of teaching, I no longer want to tell anybody or teach anybody anything. But the practice dies slowly, so rather than begging off, I’ll offer thoughts based solely on my own experience.
I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another
language is a recreation and a service to readers. I have read that a
translator of poetry should find work that fits their sensibilities. I’ve read
the opposite too. I met someone awhile back who was translating Horace for fun.
So that is probably a good start at advice. Do it because you’re wrapped up in
the words, and the vision, and you like it. But this individual wasn’t going to
try to publish.
“I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another language is a recreation and a service to readers.”
If publishing is the aim, then get the rights! There are a number of ways to do that, most
of which mean convincing somebody, poet or publisher –whoever holds the
rights– to let you do the work, or accepts the work you’ve done. To do that
you have to become the ideal reader, critic, and boatwoman to cross the mighty
river between languages. Understand where compromises are required in the
target language and decide throughout how to compensate. One way is to shift the untranslatable gerund
over to another one that suggest a similar affect
C.M. MAYO: You have also done book length translations, for example, of Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave. Can you tell a little about this experience and how it affected your own work?
W. NICK HILL: I had been tried out so to speak on Barnet’s lesser testimonial novel, Rachel’s Song, the story of a dance hall girl before Sandy Taylor at Curbstone Press asked me to do Biography. I’m not certain I’d done a very good job with Rachel who was as shallow and frivolous as cabaret life allowed in Cuba in the 20 and 30s when it was a playground for privilege. But apparently it was good enough to give me a crack at Esteban Monetejo’s story. It was a daunting challenge. Esteban was an old man when Barnet interviewed him about the saga of how he ran away from slavery, lived alone in the bush, fought in the War of Independence, and watched the Cuban Revolution triumph before he died at 105 years of age. Esteban was uneducated of course, but he was smart, wily, curious, resolute, was steeped in the lore and rituals of various Afro Cuban spiritual beliefs, and he had a sharp memory. How does such a man sound in English? Though I read U.S. slave narratives, Montejo wasn’t going to sound like them. The details of everyday life he narrated differed greatly from slaves in the U.S. in large degree because Cubans were able to hold on to parts of their heritage from Africa.
As I progressed I realized that in a very real sense as translator I was mimicking Barnet’s role in his relationship with Montejo more closely perhaps than in other translations projects. Hence the confusion of titles between my version and the previous one by Jocasta Innes who knew a lot about ethnography and didn’t want to recognize the newness of what Barnet was doing. She published her translation in England as Autobiography, thus making Montejo into the sole author. What Barnet was after was to present the runaway slave’s voice as clearly and as transparently as white man could convey. And that’s what I tried to convey in the English version of the testimony of a man who was a character, a man of contradictions, tics in his speech, and great humanity, who gave convincing details of what life as a slave and as a free man in Cuba was like before the Cuban Revolution.
I made as literal a version as I could get and then worked
to shape it within all the prohibitions and permissions I was aware of as a
person who bridges the gap between slave and free, Cuba and the United States.
I didn’t try to round Esteban out, I left phrases in Spanish or Yoruba that had
no equivalent because the original already had a Glossary that clarified
details of ethnicity, history, and the like.
I judged it to be acceptable to simply add to it. In all, I tried to fashion a voice of great
humanity in an English that was understandable but particular. A new edition came out from Northwestern
University Press in 2016, with a fine introduction by Professor Wiliam Luis.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?And another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
W. NICK HILL: I have been much aided and hindered both by digital media. Before I left teaching I was deeply involved in using the web and programs like WebCT –programs like Chalkboard today– to help students manipulate at their own speed the conjunction of sight and sound that is central to learning another language.
After I left academics, I really dove into writing poetry. I
had already withdrawn from some of those very distractions you mention because I could feel how they drew me further
into time on computers and into a popular culture that relies increasingly on
violence and the propagation of stereotypes. I don’t mean to say that there
aren’t meaty blogs, You Tubes, and the like to enrich one’s thought, but even
so it can be overwhelming, as you suggest. Thus, to say that I’m distracted
from writing by elements of Virtual Reality would be erroneous however, because
I’ve guarded against it. In fact, the
digital has benefitted my writing in two ways.
As I said previously, I published Sleight Work on my website to take advantage of the movement to
ensure access to materials remains as open and free as possible. In the world
of publishing today, there are so many access points to creative work it
boggles the mind. At the same time, so much of it has been infused with
commercialism that I for one find it disturbing. I’m sure there are exceptions,
but much of the discussion of writing on the web and in print revolves around
volume of sales, numbers of prizes, and other markers of what? Subject matter? Craft? Raw writing as a
practice? Justice? Art?
The second way that the Digital Revolution has not
distracted me resides in the fact that I have made it a focus of my work.
Awhile back I became intrigued by the Mesoamerican ballgame that was played in
ancient times and is still played in some few areas of Mexico today. The game,
variously called ullamalitzli, Pok-Ta-Pok, Tachli, was played with a heavy latex rubber ball five hundred
years before Europeans came to colonize. I’ve been writing poems about the
continuity of games in these lands. I have come to see that a continuity worthy
of further exploration exists between the contemporary world of video gaming,
itself a world apart, and those age-old games. This is a body of work that I’m
still actively pursuing.
As for tips, I’d say the policy of following a middle course
between Luddite no contact and game players who rarely see natural light is
called for. And a good healthy skepticism about how electronics will deliver
the biosphere from the predations of capitalism. Anthropologist David Graeber
has my ear when he writes about anarchism in a compelling way in his Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology.
I have always written on paper first and then make hard
copies of what seems interesting enough to work further. The most unsettling
aspect of this practice is that the pages keep on piling up. Some small
fraction of those words do get digitized. Apart from that who’s going to wade
through all those pounds of paper if I don’t. Which would seem to be a good
argument for going paperless though I can’t shake it.
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a poet and translator?
W. NICK HILL: I’m preparing for another stay in my adopted city of Oaxaca, Mexico where I will finish translating Gary Lemons’ Día de los muertos that Red Hen brought out in 2016 as a coloring book. The chiste, the joke is that I’m translating it into Spanish. More realistically, I hope to polish enough of a sample to interest a poet in Mexico to sign on with me to make it ring true with the goal of seeing about a publisher. I’ve already asked Jorge Fernández Granados, but it was a year ago and was put off-handedly so he’s probably not thinking about it now. I have published a handful of poems from his Principle of Uncertainty, so I’m hoping he is amenable. In any case, Lemons’ work dances with surreal abandon that juxtaposes eccentric, intuitive images of the splendor and suffering of creatures, from burros, to dusty young gringos, and sea tortoises, all creatures encountered in Oaxaca at various times between the late 60s and the 80s. A happy, hubristic effort of mine to render this whirling dervish of words into Spanish.
In addition, I’m going to double down on a bilingual
collection of poems that builds on Mundane
Rites / Ritos mundanos and will poke around in matters related to
Americanismus, a tentative title, for new worldisms. What the adventure of
website publishing has suggested to me is that no existing publisher I know of
will chance it with a book for bilinguals not by a Latinx writer. I’m cognizant
of the political nature of cultural work and don’t want to distract from worthy
goals of U.S. Latin@s. At the moment only on the web could I present a book for
bilingual readers who might understand what I’m celebrating. Perhaps this effort
is akin to the recognition that jazz and blues are universal art forms that
honor African American originators and share their creativity even in the midst
of racism. And then there’s that ball game project at the end of a joystick.
Thanks for giving me the chance to share
with you. Keep up the good work.
Yenta Mash and her stories will be remembered because they have rare and masterful elegance, uncanny insight into vast prairie-like swaths human nature, and unusual heart. They also tell stories entirely new for many English-speaking people, that of the Jewish exiles to Siberia under Stalin during World War II, and their later migration to Israel. Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.
Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.
Ellen Cassedy is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust and co-translator (with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub) of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel. She was a 2015 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, and On the Landing is a result of her fellowship. Her website is www.ellencassedy.com.
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for these stories?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Anyone interested in fine literature! Mash is a great read – clear, sometimes funny, and full of ground-level truths about what it was like to live through great cataclysms of the 20th Century.
C.M. MAYO: When and why were you inspired to translate Yenta Mash?
ELLEN CASSEDY: I learned of Mash’s work through the Yiddish Book Center’s translation fellowship program. Having died in 2013, she’s basically a contemporary writer. She was a down-to-earth and often witty observer of a changing world, who drew on her own life of multiple uprootings in telling the stories of people who are forever on the move.
Even in the most harrowing settings, Mash is somehow inspiring. Young and old, her characters are solid, sturdy people with a sense of humor. They’re survivors, people who land on their feet.
The
collection begins in a vibrant Jewish town reminiscent of the one in “Fiddler
on the Roof.”
We then join women prisoners being transported into the Siberian gulag, with its frozen steppes, snowy forests, and surging rivers. After the exile, we see the Jewish community rebuilding itself behind the postwar Iron Curtain. Finally, we join refugees in Israel in the 1970’s, struggling with the challenges of assimilation and the awkwardness of a land where young people instruct their elders, instead of the other way around.
C.M. MAYO: You are also a translator of the Yiddish writer Blume Lempel. Both Lempel and Mash write of suffering, exile, and grief, and yet they are very different writers, with very different experiences during and after the war. In a writerly sense, what are some of the differences that especially strike you?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Mash (1922-2013) and Blume Lempel (1907-1999) grew up in tiny towns in Eastern Europe, not far apart from each other. Both suffered persecution, displacement, and appalling losses.
Lempel left home for Paris as a young woman, fled to America in 1939, and spent the remainder of her life in New York. Her work feels shattered, fractured, unhinged. Her gemlike, poetic style and decidedly unconventional narrative strategies take readers into a realm of trauma and madness. The title story, “Oedipus in Brooklyn,” is Exhibit #1 of her taboo-defying oeuvre.
As a young woman, Mash was deported to Siberia by the Soviets in 1941. She did seven years of hard labor there, then spent three decades in Soviet Moldova before immigrating to Israel in the 1970’s. Her work bears witness in an urgent, orderly, and exacting fashion to a life full of tumult. Her language is alive with regionalisms carried to new places, bits of multiple languages picked up along the way, and neologisms invented to describe new circumstances.
ELLEN CASSEDY: The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. Yiddish newspapers, literary journals, and literary prizes flourished, as did intense epistolary friendships. I don’t have any evidence that Mash and Lempel corresponded, but they must have read each other’s work in Di goldene keyt, the flagship literary journal published in Tel Aviv. And they knew some of the same Yiddish literary figures, including the eminent poet and journal editor Abraham Sutzkever.
“The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. “
C.M. MAYO: How did working on On the Landing compare to working on Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn and to your other translation projects?
ELLEN CASSEDY: I was fortunate to have Yermiyahu Ahron Taub as a co-translator for the Lempel project. We had a rich collaboration, full of constant back and forth. For the Mash project, I drew on the resources of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA – a wonderful organization that provided me with mentors and a vibrant and an engaged community.
I did the English translation for Yiddish Zoo, a collection of Yiddish poetry for children in three languages. That was a joyful romp with lions and tigers and bears – great fun.
Now I’m working with a gifted cartoonist who’s embarked on a graphic project involving handwritten Yiddish archives. Quite a decoding challenge!
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about Yenta Mash’s literary influences? (And in which languages did she read?)
ELLEN CASSEDY: Mash knew Russian, Rumanian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. She was drawn to Yiddish literature from early childhood. As a small child, she knew poems by Y.L. Peretz by heart and was familiar with the classical Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Moykher Sforim. After her years in Siberia, she joined the vibrant Jewish literary circle in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau. But it wasn’t until she was in her fifties, when she immigrated to Israel, that she began to write. She joined the Yiddish literary scene in Israel and was a member of Leivick House, a Yiddish cultural center.
The red marker in this screenshot from Google Maps shows Chisinau, in Moldova, where Yenta Mash lived after her exile to Siberia.
C.M. MAYO: Which writers, in any language, could you compare her to?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile. Her characters are always on their way to somewhere or from somewhere. That’s why I chose the name “On the Landing,” the name of one of her stories, for the title of my translated collection.
“Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile.”
I compare her to other voices of assimilation and resilience – Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake), André Aciman (Out of Egypt), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees). Her work is keenly relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe.
C.M. MAYO: I am astonished that writing of such quality is only appearing in English for the first time in 2018. Is there more?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Absolutely! Only a fraction of Yiddish literature from the past 150 years has ever been translated into English. As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called “a major literature in a minor language.”
“As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called ‘a major literature in a minor language.'”
There’s an expression in Yiddish, “di goldene keyt,” the golden chain, which refers to how Yiddish literature has been passed down through the ages, with one writer after another adding links to the chain. Yiddish was the language that my Jewish forebears spoke in kitchens, marketplaces, and meeting halls on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m thrilled to be able to add my own link to the chain.
This year the second Monday is dedicated to a post for my writing workshop students, except when not. This post is a “not”– or rather, not exactly; I would hope that my workshop students, and indeed any and all English-language readers, may find it of interest.
This interview was an honor, and a most welcome opportunity to say some things that have been looming ever larger in my mind.
MEXICAN WRITER LUIS FELIPE LOMELÍ ASKS QUESTIONS IN ENGLISH; LA ESCRITORA ESTADOUNIDENSE C.M. MAYO CONTESTA EN ESPAÑOL
DECEMBER
2018
LUIS
FELIPE LOMELÍ: Where you were born and where have you lived?
C.M. MAYO: Nací en El Paso, Texas, en la frontera, pero crecí en el norte de California, la parte ahora conocida como “Silicon Valley.” He vivido en Chicago, Washington DC, y otros lugares pero puedo decir que he pasado el mayor número de años de mi vida en la Ciudad de México.
[I was born in El Paso, Texas, on the US- Mexican border, but I grew up in northern California, in what is now “Silicon Valley.” I’ve lived in Chicago, Washington DC, and other places, but at this point I have lived more years of my life in Mexico City than anywhere else.]
LFL:
Your profession?
CMM: Soy novelista, ensayista, poeta y traductora literaria.
[I am a novelist, essayist, poet, and literary translator.]
LFL:
What drove you to Mexico, to live in Mexico (where and for how long) and to
write about Mexico, to embrace Spanish as part of your culture?
CMM: ¡El amor! Me casé con un mexicano, un compañero de la
Universidad de Chicago, y recién casados vinimos a vivir a la Ciudad de México.
Han sido 32 años, la mayoría de ellos en la Ciudad de México.
[Love! I married a Mexican, a classmate at the University of Chicago, and directly after we got married we came to live in Mexico City. We’ve been married 32 years now, and most of these years we have been in Mexico City.]
LFL:
What do you think about U.S. immigrants that live in Mexico, what do they do
there, why are they there? Do they chose particular places to live?
CMM: Conozco mucha gente como yo, que venimos a residir en México por motivos personales. Otras también han venido por motivos profesionales, por ejemplo en la academia, en los artes y en las actividades empresariales, en todo tipo de empresas. Por supuesto allí están las comunidades de jubilados y artistas, en lugares tales como San Miguel de Allende, Ajijic, Los Cabos, y demás. A mí me parece que les ha convenido venir a México porque el clima invernal es más suave, el costo de vivir es menor que en Estados Unidos, y también por la aventura. ¡Algunas personas tienen mayores aventuras que otras!
[I know many people such as myself, who came to Mexico for personal reasons. Many also come for professional reasons, especially in academia, the arts. And others for business, all sorts of businesses. Then there are of course the retirees and artists living in San Miguel de Allende, Ajijic, Los Cabos, and so on, and it seems to me that most of them have come south because the winter weather is better, it’s cheaper to live there than the U.S., and for the adventure. Some have more adventures than others!]
Los norteamericanos han estado viniendo a vivir en México desde hace mucho más de un siglo. En los 1840s empiezan a llegar algunos comerciantes a través del Santa Fe Trail, el camino que conecta la ciudad de St Louis, Missouri con el Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, esto es, el camino real desde Santa Fe hacia a Ciudad Chihuahua, Durango, Querétaro, y la Ciudad de México. Y después, en la segunda mitad del siglo 19, por ejemplo, muchos ingenieros estadounidenses vinieron a México, ingenieros de minas, de ferrocarriles, de petróleo. Periodistas, rancheros, hacendados, novelistas, hoteleros, misioneros. Y aún mercenarios. Por ejemplo, muchos estadounidenses lucharon en varias facciones de diversos conflictos en México, incluyendo en la Revolución. Y en algún momento inmigró un grupo de mormones. Otro de menonitas.
[Americans have been coming to live in Mexico for well over a century. We start to see a few traders coming to live in Mexico in the 1840s, coming down on the Santa Fe Trail, connecting St Louis, Missouri with the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, that is to say, the old royal road down to Ciudad Chihuahua, Durango, Querétaro, Mexico City. And later, in the second half of the 19th century, many U.S. engineers came to Mexico—mining engineers, railroad engineers, petroleum engineers. Journalists, ranchers, planation owners, novelists, hotel owners, missionaries. And even mercenaries. For example, many Americans fought in conflicts in Mexico, including in the Mexican Revolution. At one point Mormons migrated into Mexico. And Menonites.]
Uno de los personajes de mi novela está basado en Alice Green,
la hija de una familia prominente de Washington DC. Su abuelo fue un ayudante
del General Washington en la Guerra de Independencia. En Washington ella se
casó con un diplomático mexicano, Angel de Iturbide, quién era de casualidad el
segundo hijo del emperador de México, Agustín de Iturbide. Ella y su esposo
vinieron a residir a la Ciudad de México en los 1850s.
[One of the characters in my novel is based on Alice Green, who was the daughter of a prominent family in Washington DC. Her grandfather was an aide-de-camp to General Washington in the American Revolution. In Washington she married a Mexican diplomat, Angel de Iturbide, who happened to be the second son of Mexico’s Emperor, Agustín de Ituride. She and her husband came to live in Mexico City in the 1850s.]
Otra historia del siglo 19, muy diferente, sobre la cual estoy escribiendo actualmente, es la de los negros seminoles, quienes eran los esclavos de los indígenas Seminoles, originalmente de Florida. Pues si, es poco conocido pero algunos indígenas tenían, compraban y vendían esclavos de descendencia africana. Poco después de que el gobierno de Estados Unidos obligó a los Seminoles a mudarse a Territorio indio, los negros seminoles se escaparon, caminando a través del desierto de Texas hacia México. El gobierno mexicano les otorgó terreno en cambio de que los hombres ayudaran al ejercito mexicano en la persecución de los apaches y otros indigenas nómadas en el norte de México. Con la conclusión de la Guerra Civil en Estados Unidos y la Emancipación de los esclavos, muchos de los seminoles negros migraron de regreso a Texas para hacer lo mismo, ayudar al Ejercito de los Estados Unidos en cazar a los apaches, comanches y otros indigenas nómadas en las Guerras Indias. Todavía existe una comunidad de los descendientes de los negros seminoles en Brackettville, Texas y otra en el norte de México.
[Another very different story, one I’m writing about now, is that of the Seminole Negros, who were the slaves of the Seminole Indians, originally in Florida. It’s little known but it’s a fact, some Indians kept and bought and sold slaves of African descent. Soon after the U.S. government forced the Seminoles and their slaves to Indian Territory, the Seminole Negros fled, trekking from Oklahoma over the Texas desert, into Mexico. In exchange for land, their men worked as scouts for the Mexican Army, which was hunting down Apaches and other nomadic indigenous peoples in northern Mexico; and after the U.S. Civil War, with Emancipation, many Seminole Negroes migrated back into Texas, to do the same work for the U.S. Army, in the Indian Wars. There is a community of the descendents of the Seminole Negroes in Brackettville, Texas, and another in northern Mexico.]
La inmigración de estadounidenses hacia México es una historia
extraordinariamente rica y compleja, pues cada persona, cada familia tiene su
propia historia. Es más, en México hay inmigrantes de varias partes del mundo.
[U.S. immigration to Mexico is an extraordinarily rich and complex history, or rather, many histories, for each person, each family has their own. Moreover, Mexico has immigrants from many parts of the world.]
LFL:
What is your impression and/or conception about this cultural exchange?
CMM: En cuanto la comunicación intercultural entre Estados Unidos y México, yo diría que hay muchos enlaces, muchos acercamientos, mucho que tenemos en común, mucho que podemos celebrar, pero no es lo que podría ser. Creo que algunas razones de eso—algunas—tienen sus raíces por allá en el siglo 16, en la rivalidad entre la España católica y la Inglaterra protestante.
[As for US-Mexico intercultural understanding today, I would say there are many connections, many bridges, much that we all have in common, and can celebrate, but it’s not what it could be. I acually believe that some reasons for this—some— have their roots all the way back in 16th century, to the rivalry between Catholic Spain and Protestant England.]
Pero enfocamos en cuestiones literarias. Hoy, un elemento, el
cual es tanto una causa como un síntoma de la falta de comunicación
intercultural, es que relativamente pocos libros se traducen del español al
inglés o del inglés al español. Como porcentaje de libros publicados es
minúsulo. Como resultado, muy, muy pocos escritores mexicanos se conocen en
Estados Unidos. Octavio Paz, quién ganó el premio Nobel. Carlos Fuentes… quizá
Juan Rulfo… algunos pocos lectores en inglés han oído de Carlos Monsiváis,
Elena Poniatowska, Angeles Mastretta, Ignacio Solares, para nombrar unos de los
distinguidos escritores contemporáneos mexicanos cuyos libros han sido
traducidos al inglés. La lista de nombres conocidos disminuye en un parpadeo.
[But to focus on literary questions. Today, one factor, which is both a cause and a symptom of problems with intercultural communication, is that relatively few books are translated from Spanish into English, or from English into Spanish. As a percentage of what original work is published it’s minuscule. As a result, very, very few Mexican writers are known in the US. Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel Prize. Carlos Fuentes…maybe Juan Rulfo… a very few will have heard of Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, Angeles Mastretta, Ignacio Solares, to name a few of Mexico’s distinguished contemporary writers who have had books translated into English… The list of recognizable names dwindles in a blink.]
Y por cierto un escritor mexicano destacado quién debe de ser más conocido en inglés es Luis Felipe Lomelí.
[And by the way, an outstanding Mexican writer named Luis Felipe Lomelí should be much better known in English.]
En México cuando voy a una librería mexicana, en cuanto a libros
de literatura traducidos del inglés, por lo general encuentro best-sellers,
Harry Potter, y así, y quizá algunos clásicos. Shakespeare, por ejemplo. Ay,
acabo de mencionar dos obras británicas. Edgar Allen Poe. Ernest Hemingway.
Ahora que lo pienso, conozco un par de poetas mexicanos quienes les encantan
los Beats, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac. El último grito en los 1950s. Hay
muchos ejemplos per, a grandes rasgos, así es la situación.
[In Mexico when I go into a Mexican bookstore, as far as books of serious literature translated from the English, I generally find best-sellers, Harry Potter, and the like, and a few classics. Shakespeare, for example. Ha, I just mentioned two British works. Edgar Allen Poe. Ernest Hemingway. Now that I think about it, I know a few Mexican poets who love the Beats, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac. Hot stuff in the 1950s. There are many more examples but, in general terms, this is the situation.]
Podemos señalar el prejucio, la ignorancia, el conservativismo
de los editores, pero podemos avanzar más por el camino de la comprehensión en
reconocer, primeramente, que lectores—en todo el mundo—prefieren leer libros
originalmente escritos en su propio idioma. Segundo, reconocer el gran sapo
gordo del hecho de que la traducción literaria es cara. Y así debe ser, puesto
que traducir todo un libro es una labor que requiere muchos conocimientos y
mucho tiempo. Aún así, los traductores literarios ganen muy poco. Cuando
traduzco poemas y cuentos cortos para revistas literarias, como la mayoría de
los traductores literarios, no cobro, o más bien no recibo nada más que dos
ejemplares de la revista. Lo hago como labor de amor, por lo general. Existen
becas y otros apoyos, pero son escasos.
[We could point a finger at prejudice, at ignorance, at publishers’ conservativism, but we can go further down the road towards understanding by acknowledging firstly, that readers—all over the world— prefer to read books originally written in their own language. Secondly, there is the big fat toad of a fact that literary translation is expensive. And rightly so, because it takes a of skill to translate a book, and it takes a lot of time. Even still, translators are poorly paid. When I translate poems and short stories for literary magazines, like most literary translators, I usually do it for free, or I should say, I don’t receive anything other than a couple of copies of the magazine. I do it as a labor of love, usually. There are grants for literary translators, for publishing literary translations. But these are few.]
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Para mí, ésta historia nos dice todo:
Tengo entendido que “Primero Sueño,” el magnum opus de Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, la gran poeta mexicana del barroco, una monja quien fue una figura
literaria monumental en las Americas del siglo 17, se traduce al inglés por
primera vez hasta 1983. Afortunadamente fue hecha por John Campion, un
traductor y poeta excelente. El libro está agotado no bastante puedes
Googlearlo y leerlo en su página web, worldatuningfork.com. John Campion, Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz.
[Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. For me, this sums it up: “Primero Sueño,” the magnum opus of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s great poet of the Baroque, a nun who was a monumental literary figure in the Americas, was first translated into English only in 1983. Fortunately it was by John Campion, a fine translator and a poet himself. The book is out of print but you can Google that up and read it on his webpage, www.worldatuningfork.com. John Campion, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.]
Mi mensaje para las escuchas de esta entrevista es que una manera en que tú, como lector, puedes mejorar la comunicación intercultural, es buscar libros más allá de los best-sellers, más allá de los libros que todo el mundo lee, y en especial, buscar traducciones. Por lo general las traducciones se publican por editoriales pequeñas quienes no cuentan con muchos recursos para hacer mercadotécnia. Si no tienes el dinero para comprar un libro, es probable que la biblioteca de tu escuela o universidad o tu biblioteca pública pueda conseguirte un ejemplar. Si no lo ves en su catálogo, no seas tímido, pregúntale al bibliotecario si lo puede conseguir mediante préstamo interbibliotecario o comprarlo para la biblioteca. No pierdes nada en preguntar. Podrías ser felizmente sorprendido.
[My message for those of you listening to this interview is that one way that you, as a reader, can help improve intercultural communication is to look beyond the books on the best-seller table, read beyond the books everybody else is reading, and in particular, hunt for translations. Translations are often brought out by small presses that don’t have much marketing muscle. If you don’t have the money to buy a book, your school, university, or public library can probably get you copy—if you don’t see it in their catalogue, don’t be shy about asking the librarian to get you a copy on interlibrary loan, or even to buy it for the library. It doesn’t hurt to ask. You might be happily surprised.]
Y si tienes ganas de hacer una traducción, que sea al inglés o
al español ¡házla! Por supuesto, si la obra original se encuentra en copyright
y quieres publicar tu traducción, es necesario conseguir el permiso.
[And if you feel moved to translate a text, whether into English or into Spanish, give it a try! Of course, if the original work is still in copyright and you want to publish it you will need to get permission.]
Como lector, tus esfuerzos son importantes. No todo el mundo lee
libros, así que para mucha gente la lectura no les parece una actividad
importante. Pero los lectores tiendan a ser gentes pensantes y de acción. Un
libro, aún leído por poca gente, aún por una sola persona, tiene el
potencial—el potencial— de un poder enorme. Un poder para cambiar el mundo. No
exagero.
[As as reader, your efforts matter. Not everyone reads books, so it might not seem all that important an activity. But those who read books, they tend to be thinkers and doers, so a book, even if read by a few people, even by one person, holds the potential—the potential— for enormous power. Power to change the world. I do not exaggerate.]
En esencia, un libro es un pensamiento grande y complejo
empaquetado en un recipiente hiper-eficiente capaz de llevarlo a través del
tiempo y del espacio.
[A book is, essentially, a large, complex thought packed into a hyper-efficient vessel that can carry it across time and space.]
Déjenme regresar al ejemplo de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Si no
has oído de esta monja del siglo 17, en este instante a través de tu laptop o
smartphone, o aún mejor, yendo a la biblioteca, lee tantito sobre su vida,
algunas líneas de su poesía. Con este pequeño esfuerzo, yo creo que cambia tu
concepto de México, de mujeres y del mundo. Vas a llegar a tus propias
conclusiones, por supuesto, pero tu mundo será ya diferente.
[Let me return to the example of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. If you have not heard of this 17th century nun, and you take a moment on your laptop or smartphone, or better yet, to go the library and read up a bit, and you read some lines of her poetry—just that little—I think your whole view of Mexico, of women, and of the world will change. You will draw your own conclusions, of course, but your world will be changed.]
LFL:
And what was your intention or the goal you pursued in editing the Mexico: A
Traveler’s Literary Companion?
Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by C.M. Mayo. Visit the book’s webpage here.
CMM: Es un retrato de México a través de la ficción y prosa de 24
escritores mexicanos, muchos en traducción por primera vez. No es un Who’s Who,
un Quién es quién de los escritores mexicanos, aunque de hecho incluye
varios escritores muy distinguidos. Más bien ofrece a los lectores en
inglés una introducción a la deliciosísima variedad de la literatura mexicana y
en México mismo: desde los puntos de vista cultural, social, regional. La meta
fue ir más allá de los estereotipos.
[This is a portrait of Mexico in the fiction and prose of 24 Mexican writers, many in translation for the first time. It’s not meant to be a Who’s Who of Mexican writers, although it does include some distinguished writers, but rather, to provide for English-language readers an introduction to the delicious variety in Mexican writing and Mexico itself: cultural, social, regional. To blast beyond clichés!]
Armar el tomo fue para mí un reto nada fácil puesto que la mayor
parte de la literatura mexicana contemporánea, por cierto la más visible,
proviene de la Ciudad de México. No obstante, encontré varias obras
espléndidas, por ejemplo, “La Dama de los Mares” por Agustín Cadena, un relato
ubicado en la costa de Baja California, “Día y noche” por Mónica Lavín en
Cuernavaca, y el relato de Araceli Ardón “No es nada mío” de Querétaro. Les
invito a leer más en mi página web, www.cmmayo.com
[This was quite a job for me as editor because much of contemporary Mexican literary writing, and certainly the most visible, comes out of Mexico City. But I did find many splendid pieces, for example, Agustín Cadena’s “Lady of the Seas,” set in Baja California, Mónica Lavín’s “Day and Night” in Cuernavaca, and Araceli Ardón’s “It Is Nothing of Mine,” set in Querétaro. I invite you to read more on my website, www.cmmayo.com.]
Reading poetry in translation can be like wafting through a door into an eerily beautiful palace. The tiles glow in new colors, shapes are peaked or oval when you expect square, juxtapositions startle, and the cats don’t meow but miau or nya or, as in Norwegian, mjau…
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe, in just a sentence or two, the ideal reader for this book?
ROGER GREENWALD: These
poems are accessible but deep, and they reflect an unusual sensibility, so
anyone who is open to a new experience in poetry is an ideal reader. My
introduction explores why this poetry that is easy to “get” is so hard to
discuss critically; the essay will be of special interest to people concerned
with our relation to the natural world and with ecocriticism.
CMM:What inspired you to translate this work?
RG: Tarjei Vesaas was and is a
famous novelist, but his poetry was like a secret shared among other writers
and a small number of readers. When I first read his poems, I realized that the
best of them were unlike any I had ever read. In addition to his special
sensibility, he has a distinctive voice, pace, and turn of phrase, as well as a
very fine ear for the music of language. And by the time of his death in 1970,
almost none of his poetry was available in English, never mind in versions that
did it justice. In some ways it is very difficult to translate. Twenty years
passed before I had translated a selection to my satisfaction, and then it took
me another eight years (eight drafts) to write my introduction.
CMM: How did you learn the language?
RG: This apparently simple
question poses a problem at once: Which language is “the language”?! I first
learned Norwegian on my own from a textbook. But Norwegian has two official
written norms, and the textbook was about Bokmål, which ultimately derives from
Danish and reflects Norway’s urban dialects. Tarjei Vesaas wrote in Nynorsk,
which ultimately derives from Old Norse via Norway’s rural dialects. I advanced
my knowledge of Bokmål by living in Norway at various times, by doing more
reading, and by bothering my friends with a million questions. Dealing with
Nynorsk required further study, and I cannot claim to have mastered it even as
a reader, so I need more advice and feedback when translating from it than when
translating from Bokmål.
CMM: What was the most important challenge for you in this translation?
RG: Vesaas has certain characteristically odd turns of phrase that are difficult or impossible to render in English. They stretch Norwegian but are not un-Norwegian, so they require creative equivalents that stretch English but are not un-English. And of course English cannot be stretched in exactly the same was as Norwegian can be. But the greatest challenge lay in the responsibility I felt to introduce English-speaking readers to this poetry in a way that would help them to see that it was modern even though it was not urban, and that its relation to the natural world was profound and not a throwback to the English Romantic poets.
CMM: Has his work been an influence for your work as a poet?
RG: I think Vesaas’s poetry
hasn’t exerted as great an influence on my own poetry as has the work of some
other Scandinavian poets, but in one of my poems (“The Milky Way. Big and
Beautiful”) I refer to him and quote three lines; and I’d say that in another
(“The Voice”), the deliberate pace and the way silence creeps into the stanza
breaks probably owe something to Vesaas.
CMM:You have been a consistently productive poet and writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
RG: I started using computers in
the early 1970s to produce files for the literary annual I edited, WRIT Magazine.
Coach House Press, where the journal was printed, was a test bed for
cutting-edge digital typesetting and layout. I learned enough about
computerized editing and typesetting on a UNIX system so that I could take
advantage of it for my own work for about twenty years before I acquired my
first Windows machine. This was an enormous benefit when it came to revision,
especially for translations, and it enabled me to get book manuscripts several
stages closer to publication than had been possible earlier. I felt that
computers trebled my productivity, not in the sense that I wrote more or
translated more, but insofar as they saved large amounts of time and encouraged
me to produce finished manuscripts and files that I knew could be used for
printing.
That was, you might say, the first digital
revolution, the second being that of the Internet and later the World Wide Web.
Online resources have made it much easier and faster to answer certain
questions that arise in writing and translating, whether these be about language
as such, about allusions in texts, or about what a certain landscape, building,
or object looks like. Email has greatly facilitated getting advice and feedback
from friends and colleagues in distant locations, consulting with authors I’ve
translated, and getting proofs from publishers. And the web has made it
possible for me to post descriptions of my books, sample poems, and ordering
links.
Resisting distraction is really a question of
psychology, work habits, and time management. We tend to forget that it was
almost as easy to be distracted and to waste time before the Internet existed
as it is now. One could read magazines and watch TV for hours a day. Those
were, though, less fragmented activities than online distractions can be now,
and were less likely to interrupt constantly. I made an early decision to stay
off all social media, mainly because of concerns about privacy and distrust of
the motives and methods of people like Mr. Green T-shirt. That decision has
meant being uninformed about a few events now and then, and it has perhaps
reduced my ability to promote my work (how many people would really have
followed a Facebook page that posted new material only a few times a year?).
But it has prevented most of the woes we all associate with social media,
including invasion of privacy, online harassment, and the expense of countless
hours on reading and posting.
CMM: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
RG: In my formative years, my
choice was between handwriting on paper and writing on an electric typewriter.
I always used paper then for any work that required real thought and much
revision during the writing process. Later I got to the point where I could
write letters and reports on the typewriter, and sometimes even fiction when it
was driven by a type of nervous energy that was in tune with the hum of the
typewriter. Even after decades of using computers, I still write poetry by
hand, and I tend to translate poetry by hand also. I can write a first draft of
fiction or translated fiction on a computer. Handwritten drafts make it easier
to see all the choices one has tried and then crossed out.
CMM: What’s next for you as a poet and as a translator?
RG: I have more or less
withdrawn from translation to focus on my own work (there is one more large
translation project that I may or may not get to someday). But I do what I can
for my previously published translations, like the Tarjei Vesaas book, which was
first published in 2000 and was out of print for many years. Finding a
publisher for a new edition enabled me to make revisions – the second time I
have been able to revise and/or expand a major selection (on the other occasion
the gap was from 1985 to 2002, when the University of Chicago Press issued North in the
World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen). Don’t ask me whether
such opportunities are translators’ dreams or nightmares!
My first book of poems was published in 1993, my
second (Slow Mountain
Train) in 2015. Now I am hoping to get out my third and fourth
books in the next two years. I have manuscripts beyond those and will be
working on getting them into near-final form. So get off Facebook and watch my
website: www.rogergreenwald.org !
